The hero had come out that Friday and the weekend was my first chance to see what he could do. Well damn.

You might not be familiar with Dota 2, but these numbers are ridiculous. He could simultaneously give everyone on his team a stun and maximum move speed every 65 seconds (these games are usually an hour long). Any player that runs through you, which they usually will to use up their stun also did 100/200/300 damage plus twice Centaur’s strength. One [expletive] button press for all that beat-down. I complain about thousands of damage that no other hero could do, also pointing to a character can be a serious threat from the earliest stages of the game and onward.

The ability was toned down on Monday and will probably see more changes in the future. Dealing with changes like these are part of playing a game in beta, but also part of playing games that see big updates at all. The metagame takes the hit for innovation while the players take the hit for the metagame, at least for a bit.

I think gamers on the whole appreciate the patching cycles. Actually, gamers expect new content for a lot of games and will stop playing if a game remains stagnant for too long. Therein lies a dilemma, change or die.

Single-player games will inevitably lose users no matter how much crappy DLC they put out, but they don’t need to perpetuate themselves through steady revenue like a multiplayer game.

A multiplayer game has to change itself to the point where if you played the same game again a year down the road, you would not recognize it as the same game.

The solution used to be releasing expansions about every year or few years to renew a player base. Blizzard games continue to have success with this but a quick look at releases this year suggests it has gone out of style as the main venue for releasing new content.

Patches work really well with the increasingly popular free-to-play model that many companies releasing PC titles are trying in some way or another, even our golden child Valve. The goal in free-to-plays would be to keep a player base around, since they base themselves around community. Patches in those games keep people interested, to varying degrees of success.

To throw some examples out there: Team Fortress 2’sMann vs. Machine drew in a ton of players as well as League of Legend’sDominion (about a year old now). Left 4 Dead 2 released Cold Stream all of which got me to reinstall those games. I'd played hundreds of hours of Left 4 Dead 2, League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 since their releases, they were great, but those patches just weren't enough to bring me back to playing those game regularly. They still felt stagnant, the same as before.

I suppose I could have played another game last weekend, but I didn’t want to. It was sad, but I preferred getting creamed by a bunch of crap-talking, trying-too-hard douche bags bragging about their Centaur Warchief welfare wins to doing something else. I got ganked by my own tower eight minutes in when I had won first-blood and they had no creeps by a centaur who might as well have been playing with his chin. Then he proceeds to destroy my full health tower before the middle hero can even think of helping. He will continue on to teleport to bottom and kill both our heroes there too a minute later, because he was Centaur Warchief he could do that.

I sat through this all for the sake of progress. I feel shame for not putting the game down, but I feel like my frustration was necessary for that progress. Small strides don't keep a player base around, games die without big changes. Sometimes we get out toes stepped on big giant hooves.

PC gamers revere Valve, a privately traded company centered in Bellavue, Washington. Valve is well-known for its high quality titles, attention to their player-base, very belated release dates and more recently, its approach to the free-to-play model many companies are turning to.

Gabe Newell has given numerous interviews on his stances regarding pricing, game communities and what Valve games plan to do with the free-to-play business model. To sum up a few points, the notion of free-to-play brings with it an increase in player base. Valve hopes to make its version of free-to-play attractive because it centers on creating a good gaming community, through punishment and reward systems, community contributions actually making it into the games and providing frequent updates because of the more steady revenue stream.

The way Valve does free-to-play differs from other games or companies that use that business model (for example Riot with League of Legends or Battlefield Heroes with EA). A lot of games have some version of what Team Fortress 2 does, where you can acquire upgrades or in-game items with an experience-like currency. However, TF2 has game impacting items available through achievements and Valve’s upcoming free-to-play Dota 2 will have all of its heroes available with only cosmetic items for purchase.

Free-to-play, even Valve’s version of it still has a lot of problems by opening up its player base to anyone with a computer, essentially. In free-to-play you see more hackers, more trolls and as a result they need a lot more policing than a game that cost someone actual money that they could be throwing away if they get banned.

I think PC gamers look forward to Valve’s version of free-to-play, though. Despite its problems, the pros are all in the updates, the accessibility to play with friends (why many of us in our twenties still game) and the constantly replenishing player base.

The player base is key, nearly every FPS and RTS follows a trend, even the terrific ones. The trend where a game’s community seems terrific at release and continues on for a few months or even a year, then starts to slump off. Valve games tend to feel this less, but it’s definitely true for some of the smaller releases out there. Eventually there will be this barrier of both skill (no one is new) and having trouble finding people to play with, pretty much killing the game that used to be so fun.

Free-to-play becoming the standard for PC games is another rant entirely though, which I'll leave to someone else.